Washington has finally thrown in the towel on its long, tortured efforts to establish peace between Israel and the Palestinians. You won’t find any acknowledgement of this in the official record. Formally, the U.S. still supports a two-state solution to the conflict. But the Obama administration’s recent 10-year, $38-billion pledge to renew Israel’s arsenal of weaponry, while still ostensibly pursuing “peace,” makes clear just how bankrupt that policy is.

For two decades, Israeli leaders and their neoconservative backers in this country, hell-bent on building and expanding settlements on Palestinian land, have worked to undermine America’s stated efforts -- and paid no price. Now, with that record weapons package, the U.S. has made it all too clear that they won’t have to. Ever.

Here’s my bottom line: America must always lead on the world stage he said elsewhere during his address. If we don’t, no one else will. The military that you have joined is, and always will be, the backbone of that leadership.

Oftewel, ‘de ruggegraat’ van de Amerikaanse hegemonie is het dreigen of toepassen van geweld. Now, go out and Kill. En met welk recht denkt Obama dat hij de hele wereld het spiegelbeeld van de VS mag maken? Dat is simpel: ‘I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.’ Obama waarschuwde de cadetten ‘never bet against the United States of America… [because] the United States has been, and will always be, the one indispensable nation in world affairs.’

American exceptionalism is the distinct belief that the United States is unique, if not superior, when compared to other nations. Champions of American exceptionalism hold that because of its national credo, historical evolution, and unique origins, America is a special nation with a special role — possibly ordained by God — to play in human history. The belief in American exceptionalism is a fundamental aspect of U.S. cultural capital and national identity. It is an essential part of America’s political, cultural, and social DNA,

To believers in American exceptionalism, the United States continues to move in constant upward pattern, remaining the beacon of light in the darkness and the defender of the rights of man as long as the nation exists. Moreover, America and Americans are exceptional because they are charged with saving the world from itself; at the same time, America and Americans must maintain a high level of devotion to this destiny. Ultimately, champions of American exceptionalism argue that American exceptionalism functions to order Americans’ universe and define their place in it.

The rhetoric of American exceptionalism permeates every period of American history… American exceptionalism has been fundamental to political rhetoric, serving as the foundation for the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which was used to justify the Mexican, Spanish–American, and Vietnam wars as well as the westward expansion of U.S. sovereignty across the American continent,

Hillary’s meltdown (woede-aanval. svh) included throwing a water glass at a staffer- narrowly missing her head, and demanding Matt Lauer be fired! She was overheard threatening executives at NBC saying ‘If I lose, we all go down and that Fascist Fuck will have us swinging from nooses! What the fuck is wrong with you idiots?’

It is reported Hillary then screamed at everyone for close to an hour and staffers felt like she was having a ‘Hitler-like rage down.’

Calls were made to New York Times, Washington Post and Huffington post and Twitter executives with orders to ‘Crush Matt Lauer.’ As you can easily see with all the headlines from these puppet MSM sources, they are completely bought and paid for.

Hillary also screamed that she wanted Matt taken off the October debate… Let’s see if that command is met. My bet is that it will be.

Staffers at HRC campaign report that they scared of her, and one described Hillary as ‘an out of control psychopath.’

Since Hillary does not allow any staff to have cell phones when she is there, no footage is available, but Hillary is in full frenzy now. She has made it clear that she wants Matt Lauer to be ‘persona non grata for the rest of his days on earth.’

Donna Brazile was singled out by Hillary during the rant. Donna was told ‘You stare at the wall like a brain dead buffalo, while letting fucking Lauer get away with this betrayal? Get the fuck to work janitoring this mess — do I make myself clear???’

After the one-hour tirade, Hillary needed to rest in a dark room, with a compress to her head.

We’ve all heard stories of Hillary’s rampages. I would certainly never want to be the object of one of her psychotic episodes. I almost feel sorry for her staff.

Christina Reynolds, Deputy Communications Director for the Clinton campaign, and Donna Brazile, chair of the campaign, received scathing rebukes from Hillary after Matt Lauer went ‘Rogue’ on her.

According to inside sources, after the town hall with Matt, Hillary went ballistic, throwing a huge tantrum, with personal calls to Comcast executives, the parent company of NBC Universal. I guess they got the message with all of the ridiculous headlines to follow over the next couple of days.

Here are a few exerts from some news sources this morning:

As he learned, Clinton had been given all of the questions in advance but was tripped up by Lauer asking her something she hadn’t been given, throwing her completely off her game and script. The topic was a tricky one for Clinton, her use of an illegal home server for the storing, receiving and transmitting of government secret documents. One of those working the event for Comcast described her as visibly beginning to boil with the asking of that question.

Her outburst began immediately after she left the stage, with her first throwing a full glass of water into the face of her assistant, with manic, uncontrolled screaming beginning at that point. The source described Clinton as the ‘most foul-mouthed woman I’ve ever heard, and that voice at screech level — awful.’

She also had some racist condescending comments for the black DNC chairman, Brazile, including suggestions that she was better qualified to be the campaign’s janitor.

One female NBC executive is quoted as saying that Brazile’s stoic response to the unhinged Clinton only served to enrage her more. She described it saying, ‘It was the most awful and terrible… and racist display — such a profane meltdown I have ever witnessed from anyone, and I will never forget it.’

Her hawkish views go well beyond her strident support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and subsequent occupation and counter-insurgency war. From Afghanistan to Western Sahara, she has advocated for military solutions to complex political problems, backed authoritarian allies and occupying armies, dismissed war crimes, and opposed political involvement by the United Nations and its agencies. TIME magazine’s Michael Crowley aptly summed up her State Department record in 2014:

‘As Secretary of State, Clinton backed a bold escalation of the Afghanistan war. She pressed Obama to arm the Syrian rebels, and later endorsed airstrikes against the Assad regime. She backed intervention in Libya, and her State Department helped enable Obama’s expansion of lethal drone strikes. In fact, Clinton may have been the administration’s most reliable advocate for military action. On at least three crucial issues — Afghanistan, Libya, and the bin Laden raid—Clinton took a more aggressive line than [Secretary of Defense Robert] Gates, a Bush-appointed Republican.’

Her even more hawkish record during her eight years in the Senate, when she was not constrained by President Barack Obama’s more cautious foreign policy, led to strong criticism from progressive Democrats and played a major role in her unexpected defeat in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries.

After stepping down from the helm of the State Department in early 2013, she made a concerted effort to distance herself from Obama’s Middle East policies, which — despite including the bombing of no less than seven countries in the greater region — she argues have not been aggressive enough. It is not surprising, therefore, that the prominent neoconservative Robert Kagan, in examining the prospects of her becoming commander-in-chief, exclaimed to the New York Times in 2014, ‘I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy.’ He elaborated by noting that ‘if she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue, it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that. They are going to call it something else.’ The same New York Times article noted how neoconservatives are ‘aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.’

Ter verduidelijking: opvallend veel neoconservatieven van het kaliber Robert Kagan manifesteren zich als fervente zionisten die de Israelische schendingen van het internationaal recht door dik en dun verdedigen. Robert Kagan, echtgenoot van de Amerikaanse staatssecretaris Buitenlandse Zaken Victoria ‘Fuck the EU’ Nuland, ‘was a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC. svh). More recently, his book The World America Made has been publicly endorsed by US President Barack Obama, and its theme was referenced in his 2012 State of the Union Address'

[i]f Clinton wins the American presidency in 2016, she will be confronted with the same momentous regional issues she handled without distinction as Obama’s first secretary of state: among them, the civil war and regional proxy war in Syria; the Syrian conflict’s massive refugee crisis; civil conflict in Yemen and Libya; political fragility in Iraq and Afghanistan; Iran’s regional ambitions; the Israel-Palestine conflict; and deteriorating relations with longstanding allies Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. There are disagreements as to whether Clinton truly embraces a neoconservative or other strong ideological commitment to hardline policies or whether it is part of a political calculation to protect herself from criticism from Republicans who hold positions even further to the right. But considering that the Democratic Party base is shifting more to the left, that she represented the relatively liberal state of New York in the Senate, and that her 2008 presidential hopes were derailed in large part by her support for the Iraq war, it would probably be a mistake to assume her positions have been based primarily on political expediency. Regardless of her motivations, however, a look at the positions she has taken on a number of the key Middle East policy issues suggest that her presidency would shift America to a still more militaristic and interventionist policy that further marginalizes concerns for human rights or international law.

Voting for War in Iraq

Hillary Clinton was among the minority of congressional Democrats who supported Republican President George W. Bush’s request for authorization to invade and occupy Iraq, a vote she says she cast ‘with conviction.’ As arms control specialists, former United Nations weapons inspectors, investigative journalists, and others began raising questions regarding the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq having reconstituted its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs and its chemical and biological weapons arsenals, Clinton sought to discredit those questioning the administration’s alarmist rhetoric by insisting that Iraq’s possession of such weapons and weapons programs were not in doubt. She said that ‘if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.’ She insisted that there was a risk that, despite the absence of the necessary delivery systems, Saddam Hussein would somehow, according to the 2002 resolution, ‘employ those weapons to launch a surprise attack against the United States,’ which therefore justifies ‘action by the United States to defend itself’ through invading and occupying the country.

As a number of prominent arms control analysts had informed her beforehand, absolutely none of those charges were true. The pattern continued when then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in a widely ridiculed speech told the United Nations that Iraq had close ties with Al-Qaeda, still had major stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and active nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs. Powell himself later admitted his speech was misleading and filled with errors, yet Clinton insisted that it was nevertheless ‘compelling.’

In an apparent effort to convince her New York constituents, still stung by the September 11 attack thirteen months earlier, of the necessity of war, she was the only Democratic U.S. senator who made the false claim that Saddam Hussein had ‘given aid, comfort, and sanctuary’ to Al-Qaeda, an accusation that even many fervent supporters of the invasion recognized as ludicrous. Indeed, top strategic analysts had informed her that there were no apparent links between Saddam Hussein’s secular nationalist regime and the radical jihadist Al-Qaeda. Indeed, doubts over such claims appeared in the U.S. National Intelligence Estimates made available to her and in a definitive report by the Department of Defense after the invasion. These reports not only confirmed that no such link existed, but that no such link could have been reasonably suggested based upon the evidence available at that time.

Clinton’s defenders insist she was misled by faulty intelligence. She admitted that she did not review the National Intelligence Estimate that was made available to members of Congress prior to the vote that was far more nuanced in their assessments than the Bush administration claimed. (She claimed that the authors of the report, including officials from the State Department, Central Intelligence Agency, and Department of Defense, had briefed her: ‘I felt very well briefed.’) She also apparently ignored the plethora of information provided by academics, independent strategic analysts, former UN inspectors, and others, which challenged the Bush administration’s claims and correctly noted that Iraq had likely achieved at least qualitative disarmament. Furthermore, even if Iraq had been one of the dozens of countries in the world that still had stockpiles of chemical and/or biological weapons and/or a nuclear program, the invasion was still illegal under the UN Charter, according to a consensus of international law experts as well as then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; it was also arguably unnecessary, given the deterrence capability of the United States and well-armed Middle Eastern states.

Despite wording in the Congressional resolution providing Bush with an open-ended authority to invade Iraq, Clinton later insisted that she voted for the resolution simply because ‘we needed to put inspectors in.’ In reality, at the time of vote, the Iraqis had already agreed in principle to a return of the weapons inspectors and were negotiating with the United Nations Monitoring and Verification Commission on the details which were formally institutionalized a few weeks later. (Indeed, it would have likely been resolved earlier had the United States not repeatedly postponed the UN Security Council resolution in the hopes of inserting language which would have allowed the United States to unilaterally interpret the level of compliance.) In addition, she voted against the substitute amendment by Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, which would have also granted President Bush authority to use force, but only if Iraq defied subsequent UN demands regarding the inspections process. Instead, Clinton voted for the Republican-sponsored resolution to give President Bush the authority to invade Iraq at the time and circumstances of his own choosing regardless of whether inspectors returned. Unfettered large-scale weapons inspections had been going on in Iraq for nearly four months with no signs of any proscribed weapons or weapons facilities at the time the Bush administration launched the March 2003 attack, yet she still argued that the invasion was necessary and lawful. Despite warnings by scholars, retired diplomats, and others familiar with the region that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would prove harmful to the United States, she insisted that at U.S.-led takeover of Iraq was ‘in the best interests of our nation.’

Rather than being a misguided overreaction to the 9/11 tragedy driven by the trauma that America had experienced, Clinton’s militaristic stance on Iraq predated her support for Bush’s invasion. For example, in defending her husband President Bill Clinton’s four-day bombing campaign against Iraq in December 1998, she claimed that ‘the so-called presidential palaces… in reality were huge compounds well suited to hold weapons labs, stocks, and records which Saddam Hussein was required by the UN to turn over. When Saddam blocked the inspection process, the inspectors left.’ In reality, there were no weapons labs, stocks of weapons, or missing records in these presidential palaces. In addition, Saddam was still allowing for virtually all inspections to go forward. The inspectors were ordered to depart by her husband a couple days beforehand to avoid being harmed in the incipient bombings. Ironically, in justifying her support for invading Iraq years later, she would claim that it was Saddam who had ‘thrown out’ the UN inspectors. She also bragged that it was during her husband’s administration that the United States ‘changed its underlying policy toward Iraq from containment to regime change.’

What distinguishes Clinton from some of the other Democrats who crossed the aisle to support the Republican administration’s war plans is that she continued to defend her vote even when the rationales behind it had been disproven. For example, in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in December 2003, in which she underscored her support for a ‘tough-minded, muscular foreign and defense policy,’ she declared, ‘I was one who supported giving President Bush the authority, if necessary, to use force against Saddam Hussein. I believe that that was the right vote’ and was one that ‘I stand by.’ Similarly, in an interview on CNN’s Larry King Live in April 2004, when asked about her vote in favor of war authorization, she said, ‘I don’t regret giving the president authority.’

As it became increasingly apparent that her rationales for supporting the war were false, U.S. casualties mounted, the United States was dragged into a long counter-insurgency war, and the ongoing U.S. military presence was exacerbating sectarian violence and the threat from extremists rather than curbing it, Clinton came under increasing pressure from her constituents to call for a withdrawal of U.S. forces. She initially rejected these demands, however, insisting U.S. troops were needed to keep fighting in order to suppress the insurgency, terrorism, and sectarian divisions the invasion had spawned, urging ‘patience’ and expressing her concern about the lack of will among some Americans ‘to stay the course.’ She insisted that ‘failure is not an option’ in Iraq, so therefore, ‘We have no option but to stay involved and committed.’ In 2005, she insisted that it ‘would be a mistake’ to withdraw U.S. troops soon or simply set a timetable for withdrawal. She argued that the prospects for a ‘failed state’ made possible by the invasion she supported made it in the ‘national security interest’ of the United States to remain fighting in that country. When Democratic Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania made his first call for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in November of that year, she denounced his effort, calling it a ‘a big mistake’ and declared, ‘I reject a rigid timetable that the terrorists can exploit.’ Using a similar rationale as was used in the latter years of the Vietnam War, she declared, ‘My bottom line is that I don’t want their sons to die in vain,’ insisting that, ‘I don’t think it’s the right time to withdraw’ and that, ‘I don’t believe it’s smart to set a date for withdrawal.’ In 2006, when Democratic Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts (her eventual successor as secretary of state) sponsored an amendment that would have required the redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq by the middle of 2007 in order to advance a political solution to the growing sectarian strife, she voted against it. Similarly, on Meet the Press in 2005, she emphasized, ‘We don’t want to send a signal to insurgents, to the terrorists, that we are going to be out of here at some, you know, date certain.’

Two years after the invasion, as the consensus was growing that the situation in Iraq was rapidly deteriorating, Clinton still defended the war effort. When she visited Iraq in February 2005 as a U.S. senator, the security situation had gotten so bad that the four-lane divided highway on flat open terrain connecting the airport with the capital could not be secured at the time of her arrival, requiring a helicopter to transport her to the Green Zone, but she nevertheless insisted that the U.S. occupation was ‘functioning quite well.’ When fifty-five Iraqis and one American soldier were killed during her twenty-four-hour visit, she insisted that the rise in suicide bombings was somehow evidence that the insurgency was failing. As the chaos worsened in subsequent months, she continued to defend the invasion, insisting, ‘We have given the Iraqis the precious gift of freedom,’ claiming that whatever problems they were subsequently experiencing was their fault, since, ‘The Iraqis have not stepped up and taken responsibility, as we had hoped.’

If certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.